A grid collapse cut power to continental Spain and Portugal for about ten hours. Hospitals largely held on generators; care outside them did not.
Sources checked when written 26 September 2026
TierGrid power lost nationally; in Portugal hospitals had limited generator capacity and triaged equipment, and EMS lost communications. How tiers are assigned.
What happened
At 12:33 CEST cascading generator disconnections blacked out continental Spain and Portugal. Major Spanish hospitals kept ICUs, wards and active surgery running on generators, with no generator failures reported by those consulted, but suspended outpatient clinics and non-urgent surgery; scanners needed restart procedures and some lab analyzers and prescribing/records systems failed. In Portugal, a perspective by clinicians and officials reports hospitals on limited generator capacity, triaged equipment, inaccessible digital records and cold-chain failures.
EMS lost communications and faced fuel shortages. Home device users were at acute risk; at least one death from ventilator failure is reported. A Nature Communications study estimated about 167 excess deaths in Spain over the following two days (95% credible interval 28 to 300), with no comparable signal in Portugal.[1,2,3,4,5]
Documented harm
Estimated +167 excess deaths in Spain (95% CrI +28 to +300), mainly women 85+; at least one home-ventilator death; eight directly attributed fatalities. In-hospital harm not documented in the sources reviewed.
What it teaches
Hospitals that pass on generators still lose labs, imaging restarts, records and phones.
The highest-risk patients during a blackout may be at home, not in the hospital.
Plan for EMS and telecoms failing at the same moment as power.
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